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From handling your contracts to managing your entire creative career, agents come in all shapes and sizes. Here's how some of the top working illustrators and agencies navigate the complicated world of art and commerce.

Being a stock photographer should theoretically work like a toll road. Build a highway once, put a gate in front of it, and then collect a toll for every use. But what do you do when the landscape shifts, when other roads are built around, or intersect with, your toll road? Rocked by new platforms and changing norms, stock photographers have had to adapt their businesses in the age of digital, crowdsourcing, and unlimited replication.

Every designer has a side project, but there’s a huge, yawning chasm between the vast empire of Swiss Miss and that Etsy shop you abandoned back in 2012. Meet a few designers turning their hobbies into full-blown businesses.

You know what they say: learn from the past or you’re doomed to repeat it. So, we’ve rounded up some of the most profound advice we're heard in recent memory to help us focus on what’s important and answer the question: Where does the best work that we can make start? With ourselves? With our collaborators? With a martini or two?

Doing killer work is no longer the only barometer of success, not if we want our stuff to be seen. We are now all judged by the clicks we receive. By our Google rankings, hearts and wows, thumbs up and shares. Mike Sager considers the question: How the heck does a creative cope with this new reality?

A big part of art appreciation is rubbing shoulders with other tourists in a gallery. But the art lovers who go the extra mile to visit artists’ house museums walk in the dining rooms, vegetable gardens, and footsteps of Renaissance greats, Impressionists, and Pre-Raphaelites.